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Russell Williams, the former base commander at CFB Trenton leaves the Belleville court after a court appearence in Belleville in 2010. (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR)

By Jim Rankin and Sandro ContentaStaff Reporters

Sun., Sept. 9, 2012

Could serial killer Russell Williams have been caught sooner, preventing the loss of a second woman’s life?

That was the question the Star had in mind when it asked the ministry that oversees police in Ontario to make public the dates when Williams’ DNA was submitted for testing.

But the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services refused, citing an “unjustified invasion of personal privacy.”

Apparently, Williams’ own.

The ministry is also refusing to release dates when the samples were uploaded to a national DNA data bank.

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All the Star is asking for is dates.

DNA samples that matched Williams’ profile and could not rule him out were taken from a sexual assault scene and, months later, from the first of his two murder scenes.

With timely DNA testing, could the second victim have been saved? Or was everything possible done, and was the second murder largely unpreventable?

Releasing the dates when DNA samples were submitted, tests were completed, and the resulting DNA profiles were fed into a national database would help clear up those questions.

The Star sought access to the dates in a freedom of information request last October. The ministry, which oversees the Ontario Provincial Police and the Centre of Forensic Sciences, denied access in a letter last month.

The ministry’s deputy freedom of information co-ordinator cited “mandatory” personal privacy provisions in the provincial Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act as the reason for the refusal.

According to the act, a ministry must not release information when it deems that disclosure of the personal information would “constitute an unjustified invasion of personal privacy.”

In denying access to the dates, the ministry cited two subsections dealing with personal information that is “highly sensitive” and where the information was part of an investigation into a possible violation of the law.

The ministry’s two-page refusal, dated Aug. 17, does not specify whose personal privacy is at issue.

The Star sought clarification from the FOI deputy co-ordinator and reiterated that it wanted only the dates when samples matching Williams were submitted for testing, and when those samples were registered in the national DNA data bank.

The deputy co-ordinator responded, saying the ministry had nothing to add to the decision letter.

Timely testing of DNA samples in Ontario came acutely under the public microscope following the1995 murder trial of serial killer Paul Bernardo, whose DNA sample from an earlier serial rapist investigation disappeared into a “black hole.”

In his 1996, 500-page review of the case, now-deceased Justice Archie Campbell noted an under-resourced Centre of Forensic Sciences as part of the reason for the delay, which resulted in Bernardo, the so-called Scarborough rapist, remaining uncaught and going on to kill three teenage girls with his wife, Karla Homolka.

Much has changed since then. Police have better case-management systems, and turnaround times on DNA testing have improved.

In the Williams case, a sample suitable for DNA analysis that was later determined to match Williams’ profile was collected from the scene of the Sept. 17, 2009 sexual assault on victim Jane Doe, who lived very close to Williams’ Tweed cottage.

DNA samples that could not rule out Williams were also taken from the scene of the Nov. 25, 2009, murder of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, whom Williams worked with at 8 Wing/CFB Trenton. Williams was the airbase commander.

But the document makes no mention of dates of tests or when or whether the DNA profiles were uploaded to a database that, in theory, could have linked the sexual assault to the first murder, and possibly caused investigators to turn their attention to the then-colonel before he could kill again.

Without the dates, it is impossible for the public to know if there was even a reasonable chance for a match following Comeau’s murder.

The National DNA Databank is administered by the RCMP and includes DNA profiles of convicted offenders and DNA profiles from crime scenes. It is used to link crime scenes and to get warrants to obtain DNA samples.

According to the Public Safety Canada website, as of January of this year there had been 21,563 DNA profile matches between crime scenes and individuals, and 2,741 scene-to-scene matches. The data bank opened in 2000.

Under Ontario’s freedom of information and privacy law, FOI co-ordinators routinely — and for good reason — deny access to anything deemed personal information, unless the person making the request is the one the information pertains to.

In this case, it would appear that the personal privacy provisions in the act are being used to deny access to dates and perhaps locations where the samples were collected. Home addresses are considered personal information. However, the locations of where the samples were taken are publicly available in court records.

Ann Rees, a former journalist who studied Canada’s FOI and access to information systems as a 2002 Atkinson Fellowship recipient, reviewed the correspondence provided to her by the Star and says the ministry should release the information because there is obvious public interest at stake.

“It is clearly in the public’s interest for (the ministry) to show that proper procedures are both in place, and were followed in the Williams case, to ensure that killers can be tracked through DNA analysis,” Rees, now a journalism teacher and completing a PhD in communication at Simon Fraser University, wrote in an email.

“As to Williams’ privacy rights, in my view he forfeited them when he became a risk to the public by attacking and killing women,” wrote Rees. “What more evidence than murder is needed to show he posed a risk to public health and safety?

“It is ridiculous to suggest that his privacy rights, particularly concerning the investigation of those crimes, should be protected over and above the public’s right to access the records”

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